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The pulse of life. Heroic emergency workers will fight to try and save it. Medical advancements are made in desperate search to heal and prolong its energy.

Expectant parents rejoice to hear its sound throbbing in the womb. Those same parents may have to hope in an anguished expectation that a talented doctor can work within that womb to mend its weakened state. Still others, when aware of its quickening sound within, will seek a doctor to extinguish that spark of life that is the heartbeat.

The simplest way to verify life and death. Does the heart beat? And the most common of senses beats a path to the doorway of the conscience.

For the veil no longer lingers over when the life begins. The heart beats loud its evidence. Now the battle over the value and who will arbitrate the value of a life?

Stark lines are drawn between those who call to God as the giver of life and those who call on government to arbitrate who is worthy to live. Those who abhor an earthly litigation for life or death are now forced by that government to fund and support the very thing they despise. A thing history describes as tyranny itself.

It stands before us now that those who hold power will arbitrate life and death. If this is true, we are traitors to all that history has warned us. In the shadows, once so distant, nearer now in the hallows, the ghastly specters of humanity, who wielded horribly the power to chose those worthy of life and death, seem just a heartbeat away.

In the April 21 newspaper, Amy Calder recounted the story of Deborah Klane and her son, Ethan, who was cut off from nursing care to help with his special needs.

Ethan, described as having cerebral palsy, had nursing assistance 24 hours a day from birth through MaineCare.

Recently, certain Democrats have claimed that Ethan was denied further nursing care because of MaineCare “cuts” under Republican-led budgets. This is not true.

Ethan lost his round-the-clock nursing when he turned 21. The school-based MaineCare program handles all eligible minors; at 21, however, those recipients are shifted to the regular MaineCare program.

For years, severely disabled people older 21 have been put on a waiting list for services because MaineCare funds were insufficient to care for them. That was the system under Democrat control, and the waiting lists still contain hundreds of people. As of June 1, in fact, 1,070 individuals were on waiting lists.

The supplemental budget for the Department of Health and Human Services — primarily for MaineCare — was passed on May 15. That budget contains a new $1 million appropriation to begin reducing the waiting lists. With the federal match, the total will be nearly $3 million.

This new money will begin the process of making sure that some of the severely handicapped, as well as others with autism and other problems, can move off the lists and into regular care.

This is believed to be the first supplemental budget ever that has contained specific line items for these waiting lists. It is unfortunate that, in the House, only one Democrat voted for this budget.